[Stoves] Jatropha and its future

rongretlarson at comcast.net rongretlarson at comcast.net
Mon Aug 8 22:21:09 CDT 2011





Jan and list 

This is to better understand your nice Jet City stove .(for non West Coast USA readers - that means Seattle - which has a lot of Biochar activity) 

1. How did you happen to center on Jatropha? Have you experimented both with whole seeds and the residue after pressing and how does stove operation differ? Have you tried anything like wood chips? 

2. I think the flame pattern in your stove is wonderful. As you say, very compact and obviously very turbulent - which must be desirable. I am pretty sure the idea of central secondary air has been mentioned n the past on this list as a possibility - but I don't recall ever seeing it in practice. Can you describe a bit how you came to the present dimensions ? 

3. I worry that you may now have too much secondary air - as the flame seems to only be holding near the bottom row or two. Have you any way of knowing what the dilution factor is? Tried operation with a smaller number of interior holes (just plugging some progressively)? 

4. The central "column" (maybe with a different height) looks like it might be able to hold a pot of the right size - since you would then already have the "convection shield" that gives considerable efficiency improvement. And you could retain the chimney height needed to get your desired air flow and power level. Ever been tried? 

5. I have felt that controlling primary air supply to be an important feature of pyrolysis stoves (TLUDs). It seems your bottom set of holes could receive a rotating or sliding (or up and down) plate to accomplish that. Has that ever been tried? (This being accomplished nicely with a blower in the "Paul Olivier design also being discussed today.) 

Best of luck with what you are doing. Nice work. 

Ron 



----- Original Message -----
From: "Jan Bianchi" <janbianchi at comcast.net> 
To: "Discussion of biomass cooking stoves" <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org> 
Sent: Monday, August 8, 2011 9:56:48 AM 
Subject: Re: [Stoves] Jatropha and its future 


Roger 


That stove in the ETHOS pictures was a prototype version. The stove is now made from steel. 


Jan 

Sent from my iPhone 

On Aug 8, 2011, at 8:51 AM, Fireside Hearth < firesidehearthvashon at hotmail.com > wrote: 






Good morning.... 

I am curious about a couple of the pictures of the stove by Otto....do I see galvanized sheet metal used in area's of high heat? the text talks about 800deg C. (1472 f.) if there is galvanized materials in contact with these temps it is quite possible that galvanic poisoning could kill the operator. A friend of mine was welding inside a galvanized pipe (large culvert for water drainage) when his oxygen mask failed and a green colored gas entered his lungs causing him some of the most horrible pain and near death experience imaginable. The other question I have is the material thickness. It does not look like this will withstand these temperatures for long. What is the life expectancy of this unit when exposed to these temps. Does it make sense to build something a bit more stout and send less of them to the land fill as the "burn out" too quickly with these exposures. Not all ways can we value things simply on "cost per unit" but "cost to the environment" should be taken into account. After looking at the industrial area's of northern China it seems to me that it is the environment which is paying for our "cheap" flat screens. 



From: janbianchi at comcast.net 
Date: Mon, 8 Aug 2011 08:08:37 -0700 
To: stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org 
Subject: Re: [Stoves] Jatropha and its future 


Jet City StoveWorks is currently conducting kitchen tests of the jatropha seed stove Marc refers to in Tanzania. 


Jatropha grows wild throughout the tropics as well as recently as biodiesel crop there. Alternatively, and more productively, it can be grown as a hedge around land holdings so it need not displace land for food production. That produces enough seed to fuel the family cookstove for a year as well as have some left over to sell into the Jatropha market. It costs at least four times less than a comparable burn time for wood and six times less than charcoal. 


We are continuing CO and PM testing and hope to have our test results online by next month. We had a stove at Aprovecho's stove camp couple of weeks ago and will have one at Paul Anderson's TLUD camp in MA in August. 
Sent from my iPhone 

On Aug 8, 2011, at 2:10 AM, Marc Pare < mpare at gatech.edu > wrote: 





Crispin, re exisiting Jatropha stoves: 


There was this one at ETHOS this year by J. Otto and friends: 
http://www.vrac.iastate.edu/ethos/proceedings2011/OttoOttoCovert_JatrophaSeedCookingStoveDevelopmentPromotion.pdf 
and a quick picture of it running outside in Kirkland: 
http://smallredtile.tumblr.com/post/3246717546/marc-in-the-wild-there-were-many-arguments-about 


It burns whole seeds in a natural draft TLUD. Draft is augmented by an inner air pipe (lots of pictures of the assembly in the ETHOS presentation) 

Marc Paré 
B.S. Mechanical Engineering 
Georgia Institute of Technology | Université de Technologie de Compiègne 

my cv, etc. | http://notwandering.com 



On Mon, Aug 8, 2011 at 1:36 AM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott < crispinpigott at gmail.com > wrote: 






Dear Friends 

I am not sure how many stove are being worked on as Jatropha seed or oil or cake burners, but my understanding was the main thrust was to put to use some of the leftovers from biofuel production, especially that was the focus in Tanzania. 

It seems those farmers who invested in Jatropha production lost about $65 per ha http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es201943v so my question is whether or not there is much point in working on (perhaps) whole seed stoves. Perhaps if the J-oil industry suffers a quick death there will still be a meaningful supply of oily seed fuel that can be burned relatively easily with a decent performance and controllability. At least until they go back to sunflower which looks a lot more promising. 

Has anyone made a sunflower seed burning stove? The oil runs up to 49% on some varieties. 

Always looking for new ideas… 

Regards 

Crispin 




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